20% of Facebook news feeds are infected

A fifth of Facebook users have malware-infected items in their news feeds, security researchers have found.

BitDefender scanned over 17 million Facebook posts and found that around 20 per cent of users had infected news feeds, with over 60 per cent of attacks originating from malicious third-party applications.

21.5 per cent of these apps claim to provide information that the social network does not allow, such as finding out who has viewed your profile or removed you as a friend. Others offer bonus items for Facebook games such as FarmVille, or purport to be special versions of popular games like Super Mario, The Sims or World of Warcraft.

Non-application related threats include malicious links and viruses that hijack the user’s account.